I'm developing an iOS game targeting iPad 3/4 that features a high resolution map display. I am using Ogre 3D as a graphical foundation. I have 100 1024x1024 textures stored as .png files which take up 58 MB of hard disk space total. I would like to display anything from 2 to 40 of these textures at once depending on zoom level. I would also like to keep RAM usage below 500 MB if possible.

I have set up some code to load all of these textures as a unique material, each assigned to a Rectangle2D. I then attached 16 of these textures to a scene node to make them visible. This resulted in around 400 MB of memory usage at varying zooms. Attaching all of the textures to that node resulted in a crash due to lack of ram even if 96 of them were off screen and culled.

I am generating 5 mipmaps by default. Assuming these were in .png format it would only roughly double the 58 MB. Obviously there is some decompression going on here. (If the generated mipmaps were completely decompressed, this would account for the memory usage). I can lower the resolution by a factor of 2 and make this work easily enough, but I'm trying to avoid having to do that.